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Historically, in Aesthetics, auratic object turned toward the study of the sensibilia and of the acts of perception, of imagination and of memory. Among the sensibilia that offer themselves to be apprehended by subjects and cultural communities, some objects of symbolic value have taken here on a special role: artworks. If it is not possible to build a unified canon of Art that is universally accepted as valid, aura is in Art the link between the symbol’s power of allusion and a symbolic idea of form. This symbolic idea of form has the visible and the invisible always simultaneously present and mediated. The artistic “form” is not a mimetic image, but it is, as Kant will say, an aesthetic idea not reducible to the word.So, when Merleau-Ponty writes about the eye and visibility, he shows how painting is an “interrogation” of the invisible through the visible: but this interrogation always begins with a unitary body, with the «delirious and secret genesis of the aspects of our body».We can then conclude that the artistic auratic object bring us beyond the “illusionism” of vision, back to the “metaphysical” significance of artistic image: to an invisible Being made of contingencies, reversibility, of living and lived bodies. Here, the “form” of objects is inseparable from the “total experience” of our embodied senses: our perception is the capacity to unite all of our sensory experiences into a “single auratic world”.

DOI: 10.4000/estetica.1610

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